Negotiation Committee

The recently formed Negotiation Committee, now co-chaired by Norman
Solovay and Peter Bernbaum, is working with its members to extract topics from the broad
range of its subject matter that will be of particular interest and relevance
to our fellow ADR practitioners as well as to other lawyers with whom we all
deal.

The Committee recently sponsored a very well-received program
by Pauline Tesler, a leading promoter of Collaborative Law, now at least as
well known for her pointing out and dealing with how the continuing flood of
neuroscience discoveries has been drastically altering prior assumptions about
best negotiation and other settlement practices. A major current focus of the Committee is following
up on Pauline’s revelations and being a leading voice in keeping up with and
informing our ADR colleagues and others about past and continuing developments
in neuroscience and their applicability to our work.

Some of the other negotiation topics presently under
consideration for possible articles, programs and exercises include but are no
means limited to:

ways to utilize negotiation to suggest the use
of mediation without its being taken, as now frequently happens, as a sign of
weakness of one’s case;

what kind of negotiated assistance can be given
to cure the all too frequent inability to successfully pass down family businesses
from one generation to the next;

the complications that both cultural and
intergenerational differences bring to negotiations and how to deal with them
singly or in combination;

how would we improve the mediation rules
recently adapted by the ICC and the AAA;

when and why negotiation and mediation may not
be appropriate; and

discussion of new texts, research and articles
of particular interest to negotiators in all disciplines.

We are pleased to say that our Committee has been attracting a
growing, interesting and diverse membership and we look forward to its
continued growth and to working closely with other Committees of our Dispute
Resolution Section.